Below you can find some meaty portions of DavidK’s review of “The Ones Who Walk From Omelas.” May I strongly suggest that you take the time to read through the entire review in addition to these excerpts!

Now please chime in with your own thoughts on this text, too. I will be happy to print them as separate posts here if you’d like, or I can create a list of hyperlinks to the posts on your own blogs. Your call. :)

While not everybody I meet shares my affection and respect for LeGuin’s work, many of the readers I encounter who wouldn’t even normally mess with fantasy fiction know this story. And I think there’s a good reason for that. “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” is a story that you read and it stays with you, cropping up every now and again as a theme of memory, a twinge of the conscience. It’s not a story you read and forget easily, or pass off as a bit of pleasant entertainment.

[SNIP]

One might be tempted to think, at first, that “Omelas” dispenses with plot, but this isn’t the case. There’s the setup (the celebration, and the comparisons of Omelas to our own civilization), the climax (the child), and the resolution (the choice of the inhabitants of Omelas to either reconcile themselves to the child, or not). Beginning, middle, end. It’s just that the story is not the story of any one individual, but the story of the way in which the entire city deals with the consequences and costs of its happiness.

Enough on technique. As much as I admire LeGuin’s bravery in crafting her fictions, and her incredible command of language, the most resonant thing for me about her work is its moral import. I cannot think on this story but that I think of how, in the United States, we are not a particularly happy people. And yet we do have a considerable amount of material security that we take for granted. Even the most wretched homeless in the United States can usually find enough food to eat (albeit from dumpsters) and find some shelter at night. It terrifies me to think that, in other countries, that even these most fundamental necessities are not guaranteed. I watched a documentary some weeks ago about children in Uganda who walk for miles every night to get from their internment camps to public buildings in distant townships, in a feeble attempt to avoid rape or being pressed into service as child soldiers, and those images still plague me. And the damn thing of it is that what material security we enjoy in America–that even the poorest of us enjoys–really comes at somebody else’s expense, when you stop and think about it. The material abundance we have is the result of somebody’s pain, somewhere–somebody has to work to make the products we buy for such a small portion of our disposable income, somebody’s country is being diminished as its resources are being stripped away. We don’t see these people who work in factories sweatshops and mines and plantations. Part of this is as a result of their distance from us; we shut them away, out of sight and out of mind, in that cellar closet that we optimistically refer to as the developing world. But ignorance is no excuse in the information age, is it? No–more often, we are unconscious of this kind of thing because we choose not to be. Or else we are conscious of it, from time to time, but find some way to accept it, and find some way to absolve ourselves of the responsibility for the lives we lead.

Does happiness exist in infinite amounts? Or is happiness a finite thing–can I only be happy at somebody else’s expense? And even if it would only be the expense of one person, would that justify my own happiness?

I really don’t know. I think on these things, for hours at a time, and just find my mind spinning around, arriving at no conclusions, my conscience stinging the back of my skull.

Do the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one? Or do the needs of the one outweigh the needs of the many? The *Star Trek* movies don’t really help in figuring that one out.

Reading “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” doesn’t make me feel good about the world. It doesn’t make me feel secure, or that everything will be okay in the end. It doesn’t reinforce my convictions. Which is exactly why I feel the need to pick it back up, every now and again, and wonder how many children there are out there, shut up in closets, suffering so I don’t have to.

Gentle reader, this story represents my very ideal of what fantasy fiction can and should do. Rather than offering up a mindless escapism, this fiction holds up the mirror of metaphor to our own reality, and offers up a distorted reflection that is somehow more true than a literal representation. LeGuin’s fantasy has all the power and truth of dream, and is profoundly human for all of its flight from our mundane reality. Stories like this are why I write, and stories like this are what I hope to someday write. Not to compete with Ursula K. LeGuin, because I don’t think I could improve upon her work in any way, and because I don’t think I need to re-say what she has already said. But in my own way, I hope to capture that dreaming truth, that myth that can say so much more than data and direct exposition ever could.

For those of you who are eager to get going on the pilgrim book club, let’s start with “The Ones Who Walk From Omelas”, which you can find online here.* I hereby nominate DavidK (self-avowed LeGuin fan) to write the first post on the story, and then we can all chime in with our observations, comments, queries, and high-fives.

Note: All book group posts can now be easily found under the sidebar category of “Book Club.”

If you are waiting for a podcast to download and you randomly click on a song in your itunes library, and pouring forth is “Figlio Perduto“, as sung my Sarah Brightman. And you close your eyes and remember. That one Sunday that seemed like every other Sunday until the organist started playing the postlude. And it was Beethoven’s music, the music behind Sarah’s singing. And you sat back and let the song wash over you, because the organ was loud and D’s playing was perfect, and you were not caring that everyone else was leaving for Sunday School. And if this is you remembering this right now, you may feel a bit sad. Wishing you could be with that organ again, hearing that song. Someday. When the rest of life isn’t crowding around.

By and large Quakers tend to be busy people, and you rarely find them wondering how to occupy their time. They would, however, be the first to recognize how essential it is for them to have periods of disinvolvement, even from the activities which express their continuing concern to care for people …. In our disinvolvement two elements will be present. First is a kind of detachment that while standing back, accepts all experience in the hope of transcending it- seeing beyond it creatively. Secondly a cessation from all mental activity so that the body and mind are as still and quiet as possible.

LET the guest sojourning here know that in this home our life is simple. What we cannot afford we do not offer, but what good cheer we can give…we give gladly.

We make no strife for appearance sake.

Know also, friend, that we live a life of labour, therefore, if at times we separate ourselves from thee, do ye occupy thyself accordingly to thine heart’s desire.

We will not defer to thee in opinion or ask thee to defer to us. What thou thinketh ye shall say, if ye wish, without giving offense. What we think, we also say, believing that truth hath many aspects, and that love is large enough to encompass them all.

So, while ye tarry here with us we would have thee enjoy the blessing of a home, health, love and freedom, and we pray that mayst find the final blessing of life. PEACE

It’s the birthday of the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, born Virginia Stephen in London (1882). She never went to school, but her father chose books for her to read from his own library. Her brothers all went to the best universities, and she wrote letters to them about her reading. She was only allowed to move out of her family home after her father’s death, when she was 22. She moved into a house with her brothers and sister, and instead of writing letters about what she’d been reading, she began to write literary criticism for the Times Literary Supplement, and she became one of the most accomplished literary critics of the era.

Woolf believed that the problem with 19th-century literature was that novelists had focused entirely on the clothing people wore and the food they ate and the things they did. She believed that the most mysterious and essential aspects of human beings were not their possessions or their habits, but their interior emotions and thoughts.

She considered her first few novels failures, but then in 1922, she began to read the work of Marcel Proust, who had just died that year. She wrote to a friend, “Proust so titillates my own desire for expression that I can hardly set out the sentence. Oh if I could write like that!” Later that summer, she wrote in her diary, “There’s no doubt in my mind, that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice.”

Woolf’s next book was her first masterpiece: Mrs. Dalloway (1925) about all the thoughts that pass through the mind of a middle-aged woman on the day she gives a party. Woolf went on to write many more novels, including To the Lighthouse (1927) and The Waves (1931), but she was also one of the greatest essayists of her generation. In her long essay about women and literature, A Room of One’s Own (1929), she wrote: “So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery.”

Dear rats:I know it’s been very cold lately–downright frigid, even. And I’m sorry that it’s difficult to find a warm place to sleep outside, especially since the recent construction has eliminated all the steamy mulch piles along California Ave. But good news is ahead–the days are getting warmer so you won’t be as desperate for a cozy space in the near future.

So small-talk aside, let me just say that it’s not in your best interests to continue seeking shelter and warmth under my car hood. And if you do so, your days may well be numbered (yes, that IS A THREAT). Because today, when I was writing that $700 check to the car dealer for the repairs made to my engine for rat damage, let me tell you that I was feeling rather ungenerous at that moment. Especially when I realized that that much dough could’ve bought you and your posse a pretty nice trip to some warm Caribbean island, where you could be sipping pina coladas and working on your tan lines, watching the rat babes in their trendy brazilian-cut bikinis and whistling at a lot of nice tail. But instead you were frolicking around under my hood, sucking oil out of frayed hoses, sharpening your incisors on electrical cords of various sizes–including those that allow the engine to revv up and get all warm and cozy to begin with. And can I just tell you that imbibing petroleum products is NOT GOOD FOR YOUR HEALTH! You could get cancer that way, you know.

And I’ll have you know that this wasn’t just any car that you were tampering with, but is a vintage model station wagon, the likes of which are impossible to find on resale lots. So DO NOT MESS WITH THE CAR or you might be finding yourself with a new set of cement shoes. Capice?Sincerely,pilgrimgirl

My friend Chris Bigelow and some of his buddies published an LDS humor column, “The Sugar Beet” (like The Onion for Mormons) for several years and have combined the best of their work into The Mormon Tabernacle Enquirer.

I’ve reprinted a bit of one of their funnier articles here, some positions from the Mormon Kama Sutra:

Retention and ReactivationThe Stripling WarriorUrim and ThummimThe PPIHold to the RodThe Secret CombinationCome, Thou Font of Every BlessingHie to KolobThe Rameumptom

To this list I would add:The Bishop’s DaughterThe RM

So I’ve been trying to come up with some similarly funny positions using Quaker terminology and I haven’t come up with much–perhaps I don’t know the lingo well enough yet. Perhaps ya’ll can chime in with some of your own ideas?

So if one shares a google calendar with one’s spouse, and the calendar is starting to fill up quickly (meaning, very few nights at home together in the next few weeks), is it appropriate to ‘calendar’ sex? And if so, does one make it a one-time appointment or a repeating event?

[So I was going to include an image of a blackberry (aka handheld organizer thingy) with this post, but the only image that appealed to me, was this one…]